The Secret Footballer: it will be love and hate with the fans, so just accept it

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/nov/06/the-secret-footballer-book-extract-fans-supporters

Version 0 of 1.

For all the books written about football, for all the information available online, and for the closeness that it is still possible to feel to the players in some areas of the country, the fans will never really know how a player feels when he steps on and off the pitch, what it’s like to score, what it’s like to win a football match, and how it feels to have 80,000 people watching what you’re about to do with the ball.

The fans work all the hours that God sends so that they can spend part of their income on an expensive ticket to watch us play for the sum total of 90 minutes, and most of them aren’t overly bothered about any problems that a player may have outside of those 90 minutes. In fact, most of the fans I talk to, including many of my friends, believe that the right amount of money will remove any problem a footballer may have. While it is true that monetary problems are generally squashed in the womb, many of the other problems everybody has to deal with in everyday life persist. We’re not all that different.

And it isn’t really a surprise that some fans can’t get on board with that. The level of passion they feel for their local club will always evoke a sense of belonging that foreign players, in particular, should never be able to feel – unless a foreign player comes to the club and plays well, of course, then he becomes an adopted son. Football provides fans with a sense of passion like no other pastime I know of, and every now and again it blows up on all sides.

When Mark Viduka played for Middlesbrough he found himself – where the fans were concerned – in a tight spot. When things were going well he was their best hope for another season in the Premier League, but when things were going badly he was the unacceptable face of inflated footballers’ wages, paid with fans’ hard-earned money by a chairman in pursuit of exactly the same goal.

In one particular game, things – as you might expect with a club like Middlesbrough – were not going according to plan. The team were losing 0–2 to Aston Villa when Viduka was taken off at half-time. The announcement led to frustrated jeers by the home fans. I’ve seen it a million times before – it is the insatiable and totally irrational need for people who know next to nothing about football to reduce the game to a primeval and nonsensical rationale so as to have some flimsy foundation upon which to demonise their own come Monday morning. In short, the need for a scapegoat is as pressing as the need of an ex-teammate of mine to have sex with as many different women as possible.

As the tall Australian walked toward the side of the pitch the boos grew louder, until Viduka had taken his seat on the bench, where he was then faced with the fans abusing him from all sides. As the stadium erupted with all eyes on the centre-forward, Viduka, looking dead ahead as he sat on the bench, began to sing the Monty Python classic ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’, complete with the whistling. Needless to say, it didn’t go down well with the Riverside faithful.

When the game had finished and Middlesbrough had duly lost, the players made their way out to the car park. The players’ cars at Middlesbrough, for some inexplicable reason, are parked right opposite the main stand and protected by a waist-high, makeshift, metal fence, patrolled by two security guards. It isn’t that anybody is daft enough to try to steal the cars, it’s the fact that in Middlesbrough there isn’t a lot of money about and when the team loses a football match, the people don’t really want to be confronted with £100,000 sports cars 10 minutes after the final whistle of a game in which they have been played off the pitch.

At £60,000 a week, Mark Viduka was the highest earner at Boro at that time and, as he left the ground, he walked into a barrage of abuse from fans who had congregated around the metal barriers protecting the gleaming cars within.

As he walked into the enclosure, a group of fellas began to get very vocal and aggressive, before one rather portly gentleman did his best to bring about early onset cardiovascular disease by abusing Viduka and all he stood for at the top of his voice: “I pay your fucking wages, Viduka.” As he got to the car, Viduka put his bags down and started walking towards the four-foot-high metal fence a group of 30 or 40 fellas were pretending to have a great amount of difficulty in scaling.

“You pay my wages?” said Viduka, looking the biggest fella dead in the eye.

“That’s fucking right,” said the ringleader.

And with that Viduka extended his hand and said, “Fair play to you, mate. You must be one rich fucker.”

And that’s when you know it’s time for everybody to go home without saying another word. Apparently, they still talk about it up at Boro.

The problem with a lot of fans is that they want to let off steam; they want to vent frustration. It’s in their blood, they can’t help themselves – they seem to get a serotonin rush from deriding others at football matches. In one of the best scenes from the film Fever Pitch, an Arsenal fan, an old boy, sat in a café and said, “They were fucking rubbish last year and they were fucking rubbish the year before. I don’t care if they’re top – they’ll be fucking rubbish this year too, and the year after that.”

That scene was shot to reflect the 1971 season, a year in which Arsenal won the double for the first time. At the end of his rant, the old boy turns to a kid enjoying his first-ever football match and says, “Here, have a look at the No8 this afternoon, John Samuels his name is. Remember his face, then, if you should happen to bump into him, tell him to sod off to Spurs.” And that, in a gloriously perfect scene, is how footballers understand football fans. As far as they’re concerned, we’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t.

Some people are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are. Professor of psychology at Cornell University, David Dunning, argues that in order to know how good you are at something, it requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place – which means if you’re absolutely no good at something at all then you lack exactly the skills you need to know that you’re absolutely no good at it. Understand?

But don’t take my word for it. Dunning, and his accomplice at Cornell, Justin Kruger, were awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Psychology for their efforts and that carried a £1m reward. I could have proved their theory after just one trip to Middlesbrough, where expectation and reality are at least 10,000 light years apart. It’s difficult to tell exactly who is stupid. It’s at times like this that I feel extremely religious.